Roadmap

One month into the start of a new year saw a lot of changes at Studio 397. First of all we welcomed a handful of new colleagues, most of which with long track records in content production, to further extend the Studio’s capabilities to create content. Then, halfway through January, we could finally tell the world about the project we had been secretly working on for the last year and a half. We have licensed our physics engine and provided a helping hand to Amazon Game Studios in creating The Grand Tour Game to accompany the third season of the series that airs on Amazon Prime. Released on consoles, like the show, this is a fun game you can easily pick up with your friends. As far as we know it’s the first time a game releases in sync with a television series, adding weekly content as new episodes air and closely following the antics of the show.

Let’s also look at some of the work in progress, just to give you an update on how things are going. Our competition system and new UI are the highest priority things our developers are working on right now. Step by step we will be expanding the competition system and testing more parts of it in public, and we’re currently integrating it into our new UI to ensure it is both easy to find and join competitions. Expect us to reveal more towards the end of the first quarter of this year.

Then let’s look at some of the content that is in progress, starting with the Tatuus cars. Physics wise the cars are mostly done, but we are still doing some fine-tuning of the 3D models and making sure the materials are all using our new system. We will release this pack with an extensive set of real-life liveries, which also means we’re busy making sure we get approvals from all the teams involved. We don’t have a fixed release date yet, but these cars will be shipping soon. Then there’s the Reiza Pack, which is still being finalised and the cars in it are upgraded to the new material system. Nordschleife is obviously also still in the works and it looks like its release date will slip based on the first predictions we made, mostly because we got the right scan roughly two months later than expected. In the mean time we will also keep upgrading more cars to the new material system, releasing updated templates and upgrading the existing liveries. We are also working hard on adding more new PBR based shaders to the material system for tracks and other parts of our cars. Not only that, we are working on a number of features to enhance your experience.

GT3 Challengers Pack

Many have been racing our new GT3 cars on tracks all over the world while anxiously waiting for more liveries as well as templates and information on how to paint these cars with the new material system. For each of the new cars we’ve added a couple of liveries to brighten up the field. Some from real teams running these cars, in other cases fantasy liveries, partially because some of these cars were so new that not many teams were racing them already. Those are all included in the update, alongside the new templates.

At the same time, we spent a bit of extra time to make sure the new liveries worked well on-line. As the new material system really requires you to build a livery from multiple textures, we made some improvements to ensure that these textures automatically get packaged in a so called MAS file to ensure all parts get transferred to a server (and other clients) if the server has skin transfers enabled. All of this, and more, is explained in the guide we made for making your own liveries, which is the next thing we will discuss in this roadmap update.

Car Paint Editor

To get the best possible results when designing your own livery, we decided to create a guide on painting your own car, to accompany the new templates and material system. We tried to make this a guide for beginners and advanced painters, covering all aspects. The first version of this guide can be found on our documentation site. Please take a look and let us know what you think, and what we can still improve! We will be adding new materials over time, so do please leave feedback. Do make sure you post your creations, we will be featuring a paint every fortnight – so get creative!

Formula E Gen 2

You might have guessed it already, but we are bringing you the new Gen 2 car from Formula E soon, with all the current team liveries and helmets. On top of that we are bringing you a new track that was adapted specifically for fast and fun racing with these new cars. The track is called Lester Formula E Edition, it’s a fantasy track that has been adapted with a few chicanes, despite that, it is still fast and flowing, great for Gen 2 action!

Competition

The Prelude – 3 hours of Sebring qualifiers are going into the final stages, with almost 100 drivers lapping around the bumpy track, the top 40 will be secured for a spot in the all GT3 powered field. On February the 16th the race will be broadcast live on our YouTube, Twitch and Facebook accounts so make sure you tune in!

Top 3 teams will get a special invite for the 12 hours of Sebring that will be hosted in March. The hotlap competition to enter the 3 hour event ends on Sunday the 3rd of February at 23:59, so buckle up and head on over to our competition page: https://rfactor2.studio-397.com/

The 12 hour event will be a diverse field of invites, qualifiers (top 3 from the 3 hour race) and teams that have qualfied into the competition. We will be hosting this race with the LMP2, GTE and GT3 packs, more info about this in the next couple of weeks. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Discord where news will be shared as well on our forum. In other news our competition system is taking real good shape and will be used for daily races within in short period of time.

The ESL MAPFRE competition has also kicked off with, featuring well-known names across sim racing, tomorrow round 2 begins so make sure you tune in.

Welcome to the last roadmap update of the year! We decided to end the year with a bang, with a new car pack and the first iteration of our updated material system being released real soon now. We have a lot to share, so I’m afraid this roadmap grew a bit bigger than it normally would. So let’s get started!

Looking Back

December is always a month where we look back at the year. We started the year having just announced the DX11 graphics engine as the new default and in January we introduced a brand new trailer. A lot has happened since.

In the first quarter of the year, we announced that we would start our first laser scanned track, Sebring. We also continued to work on Zandvoort and signed a license with Portland. A lot of time was spent on improving performance of the DX11 engine, resulting in build 1110 that brought significant improvements as well as a brand new HUD and a few other fixes. We also released the first third-party paid content with KartSim, featuring three tracks and two karts. Finally we released the liveries of the GT3 paint competition as an update to the existing pack.

In the second quarter we kicked off with the Luminis DevCon, a developer oriented conference where we showcased rFactor 2 along many other things our parent company worked on. A few weeks after we were present at the Jumbo Racing Days in Zandvoort, where we collaborated with the KNAF, SRVN and CitySimRacing to show a broad audience how exciting simracing is. After teasing the five cars earlier, we also released the Endurance Pack, featuring a few new code features as well, such as position lights and in-car TC and ABS support. Soon after we updated our GT3 pack with those features too. To please the fans of historic content, we released both the Brabham BT44B and March 761 and we announced a third car from the same era, the McLaren M23. Improvements were also done to our tTool for modders. And we started doing community nights!

The third quarter kicked off with our presence at Chinajoy followed by the SimRacing Expo, where we announced and released three brand new McLaren historic race cars, the previously announced M23, the MP4/8 and the MP4/13. All of those were going to be used in the rFactor 2 qualifiers for the McLaren Shadow competition. Historic fans could also enjoy a big update to Longford, and we released Sebring, marking a new milestone in accuracy and attention to detail. A new build and demo was released alongside updates of the GT3 and Endurance pack, leveraging feedback we got from our visit to Duqueine Engineering, and we announced the second third-party pack from Reiza Studios, which incidentally should be out early 2019. We also for the first time showed a glimpse of the new material system, and we announced that we obtained a license to the Nurburgring, which we intend to release at the end of Q1 next year. Also fully laser scanned of course.

The fourth quarter of the year started with the release of Botniaring, a local and quite exciting track. Build 1112 was released with enhanced wheel support, and we announced no less than six cars to be featured in the upcoming Tatuus pack next year. We also started teasing upcoming GT3 cars, as well as more details about our new material system. Ongoing work also includes improved modding tools. And of course we could finally tell the world we had been working with Amazon Games on The Grand Tour Game that allows you to “play the show”, to be released in a few weeks from now!

The year in statistics: We released a total of three major code updates, a number of tracks and no less than fourteen new cars.

Competition

As we announced in November´s roadmap our competition system is now moving into a more serious testing. During the holidays we will host a hotlap competition each day, starting off with the two GT3 packs on Zandvoort on December 26th. A new hotlap competition will be activated every day at midnight (CET) until New Years. In January we will start hosting daily races. We have 2 focus points. One is to get the community racing and second is to gather valuable data from our competition system. While we are still merging this system into our new UI, we still need to get data on backend and performance. Remember this is early access, so there might be alterations during the competitions – such as a restart if needed. However our initial tests have worked out great and we now feel we should include each and everyone of you. We´ve currently set a time slot of 17:00-21:00 as our event time, however once our competition is building obviously other timezones should be favoured as well. Are you ready? speaking of ready…

GT3 Challengers Launch Stream

As mentioned elsewhere you might have seen the upcoming DLC with 5 new GT3 cars, the pack is being presented live and with the chance to WIN and to RACE it live as well. Tomorrow at 19:00 CET, Rene and Marcel will talk you through the new Material system and cars. Then we will switch over to Jimmi who is broadcasting 2 races. First race will be YouTuber´s only on Sebring – then after this race we will share the competition password. Then it will be open until the split is full. 2nd race is on Mores, the “mini-championship” winner will get 10 GT3 Challengers pack DLC keys to give away to their community. Remember you can still enter our giveaway here: https://gleam.io/INIxQ/rfactor-2-christmas-giveaway-2018

Material System

During the Sim Racing Expo last September we showed the very first preview shots of the material system we have been working on for the last half year or so. In the last roadmap of the year, we want to take the opportunity to look back at the things we implemented for this system, as well as look ahead at its incremental release over the next couple of months.

Let’s first take a step back at the challenge we had when we started, so you better understand why we made the changes we did. When we took over the development of rFactor 2 a little over two years ago now, we wanted to make sure we upgraded the graphics engine and future proof it, all without sacrificing backwards compatibility. Our first steps therefore were to develop a DX11 based engine that rendered exactly the same as the old DX9 one. This then allowed us two things. First of all we could implement VR support and second of all we could start using more modern techniques such as using a post processing library. It also enabled us to add proper support for rain, with raindrops that ran across the car bodies and windscreen and proper wipers to clear you windscreen again. We also used the opportunity to implement puddle maps for the tracks and linked them to our realroad system so puddles would show up in locations where there was water according to your dynamic realroad system. At his point we also made DX11 the default and removed support for the DX9 engine subsequent builds.

However, it did not fix one core aspect of the graphics engine, namely support for Physically Based Rendering, a technique that has become the de facto standard in the industry.

What is PBR? – some of you may ask. Well Physically Based Rendering has become the buzz word in the games industry, to encapsulate a whole new way of doing art. It demands big changes to how art is produced but the benefits are certainly worthwhile as it delivers much more consistent and predictable results. In the past artists were only able to create textures that looked good in specific conditions and would not behave naturally as the lighting changed. When broken down this new pipeline is actually comprised of two parts, PBR concentrates on light conservation ensuring that a surface can not reflect more light than it receives – this helps to ensure that the balance between specular and diffuse reflections are always correct. The next key part is Image Based Lighting. This helps ensure assets react to the surrounding environment more naturally, meaning that all different surfaces can be lit by the environment correctly – all the way from mirror reflections down to the roughest matte rock surface. All this combined results in a pipeline that is much more intuitive for artists to produce realistic results, especially with a range of industry standard values for different materials. There are two different types of pipeline implementation out there: Metallic/Roughness and Glossiness/Smoothness. Our implementation is very similar to Metallic/Roughness.

Implementing this was challenging for us for several reasons.

First of all, like with everything we did, we needed to stay compatible. What made this hard is that we knew there were some fundamental issues with our lighting model that prevented us from properly introducing PBR and getting the desired results. Therefore we first needed to go deeper and address the lighting model. A year ago we took the first step in that direction when we introduced “Image-Based Lighting for Ambient”, improving how ambient light got rendered on tracks and introducing ambient probes that could be strategically placed to create the right atmosphere.

The next step was to implement a convolved cubemap specular as part of our IBL system, which was an important basis for starting work on new materials. The material system we developed allows us to use unique and specialized parameters for each shader instead of relying on standard settings. The first materials we worked on were the PBR car paint shader with support for clear coats that fully used the IBL system we described above and allows a car body to be made of up to 6 different materials and a generic PBR shader that can be used to emulate a broad range of materials and covers a lot of things you see on a track. We have worked hard to ensure that the generic shader matches game industry standards, as well as being extremely flexible to be used on the majority of objects. Terrain and Road surfaces are obviously something that need more specific solutions though. Prototyping work there has already started and we are looking to give them a complete overhaul too.

This is where we are now. We are far from done, both in terms of developing the system and in terms of adapting existing content, but we decided to not try and do an “all in one, big bang release” but instead choose a more phased approach that we choose more often when making big changes.

We anticipate this phase to take a couple of months, during which we will transition things step by step. This also means the first release, that we will release really soon now, has a few minor known issues and the overall look of the game will improve. That said, the results of the materials we have developed so far were encouraging enough for us to decide to apply them to the new cars we are building.

Let’s first discuss some of the known issues. Obviously one is that we have not converted most content yet, which means that many of the cars and tracks you will be using now are more or less still looking the same. Another known issue is that our post effects are not fine-tuned yet to the new materials. That means in some conditions they produce unbalanced results, like too much glare. We are currently comparing our output to that of industry standard ray tracing solutions to make sure our output matches such solutions and when we are happy with that we’ll re-calibrate the post effects to work with realistic light intensities from things like headlights and solar specular. If it bothers you, we recommend you turn those effects down a notch or two for the moment.

So… Where do we go from here?

Looking Ahead

The first release of the new cars will not yet include instructions on how to paint them using the new materials. Therefore they will also not come with a template. We intend to provide extended documentation as well as templates in an update we plan in January. That is also the month we start updating other content and help our modding community do the same. We are polishing the workflows for defining materials, providing a wide selection of materials that can be consistently used on cars and tracks. Our next steps will be to continue development of a few very specific materials for things like realroad, curbs, grass and possibly a few other things, such as an improved system for rendering clouds. Our goal is to have materials on all major pieces of content by the end of the first quarter and to do smaller tweaks in the second quarter, making the whole system more robust and possibly further optimizing certain aspects of it.

Talking about tooling, we will also release our Max plugins for up to date versions, and we are looking at other types of tools too that should help modders and ourselves to create new content. And of course there are many other topics we should update you on, such as the competition system and UI. They are probably taking a bit longer than we all expected, but I’m confident that we will see them materialize in 2019, and since this update is already almost the size of a book, I propose we save some of that for the next edition. If you’re still reading at this point, we would like to wish you and your loved ones a great holiday and all the best for the future on behalf of everybody in and around Studio 397!

Good evening, morning, afternoon or whatever it is in your corner of the world! With clockwork precision we present you another roadmap update for your favorite racing simulator. And although we are getting closer to the holiday season, we are by no means slowing down! With the release of build 1112, we have a few other updates for you that we’re sharing this month, in anticipation of some bigger surprises next month. Let’s kick this month off with some events, the first one happening this weekend.

McLaren Shadow semi-finals

We’re really looking forward to the McLaren Shadow semi-finals, especially with some rFactor 2 regulars taking part. Each of the drivers will be competing across a number of different titles, including rFactor 2, so check out the semis this weekend!

You might want to set yourself a reminder so you won’t miss the live broadcast:

rFactor 2 at Interclassics

January 11th to 14th, rFactor 2 will be present at Interclassics 2019, Maastricht, where we will have two full-motion rigs running the simulation. To match the theme of the event, we will be running the McLaren M23 at the classic Monte Carlo track. On top of giving you this classic beast to drive during the event, we will also organize and broadcast a full race, featuring ten more high-end simulators located at the nearby Adrenaline Xperience center. During the whole month of December, a special promotion will allow you to do extensive sessions in all three historic McLaren cars at a very attractive price. During these sessions, you will get professional feedback on your performance based on telemetry data. The ten best drivers that month will get an opportunity to race against Bono Huis and Xavier Maassen during Interclassics.

VIVE Pro McLaren Limited Edition

As you may have seen our partners announce already, roughly a week ago, we’ve collaborated with HTC and McLaren to bring a special version of rFactor 2 to the VIVE Pro McLaren Limited Edition. This version of rFactor 2, which allows you to race some classic McLaren racing cars on different tracks, has special “driving” support for the VIVE motion controllers. That means if you own this VR headset, you will be able to experience driving these cars as if the controllers were the actual steering wheel! As far as we know, this is a world first for simracing, and we are proud to bring you this innovation!

Build 1112

Right before the holiday season, we bring you an update to our build with a few fixes and some new features. We made the following changes:

We added the ability to set the maximum steering wheel rotation “in software”, even if your wheel drivers don’t support that. This is described in more detail below.

Supporting this new feature, we added controller profiles for direct drive wheels: OSW SimuCube and SimSteering.

We fixed an issue where tyre heat cycle history was not correctly transferred after a driver swap.

Support for the Logitech G29 and G920 was added, fixing some long outstanding issues with these wheels.

A small loophole was fixed that would allow you to circumvent fixed setups.

Server administrators must update all dedicated servers because we bumped the version number due to small changes in the multiplayer protocol.

Software Wheel Rotation Explained

We have added the option to set the maximum rotation of the steering wheel “in software”, so we can adjust the rotation per car even for wheels that don’t support setting the rotation in their driver. This means that current owners of various OSW and SimSteering wheels can now finally enjoy the correct rotation without having to manually set it outside of rFactor 2. The system works as follows: In order to use this new system, you have to explicitly turn it on in your Controller.JSON file (which you can find in your UserData\player folder). The line you’re looking for is called “Steering Wheel Software Rotation,” and if you don’t see it yet, please make sure you have updated to build 1112, run the game once and exit it again. The line defaults to “false,” and you should change that to “true”. The next step is to go into your wheel driver and the rotation to the maximum value it supports, up to the maximum rotation of 1440 degrees that rFactor 2 supports. Then you go back to your Controller.JSON and set the “Steering Wheel Maximum Rotation Default” to the same number of degrees you just configured. If your wheel actually does support us reading the maximum rotation, you can alternatively set “Steering Wheel Maximum Rotation from Driver” to “true” so we will read whatever you set from the driver. We do recommend setting it to the maximum value in the driver, as we can only make the rotation less in software, not more. Finally we have a value called “Steering Wheel Bump Stop Harshness,” which acts like a spring constant and defines how harsh the buildup of counter-torque will be when you go over the maximum rotation for a car. We recommend starting with a value of somewhere between 20 (soft) to 50 (harsh), but this really depends on your wheel and personal preference. For SimSteering and OSW, we added some profiles to our default set as well. You might want to give those a try as they are already setup for this new feature.

In summary, these are the new parameters in the Controller.JSON:

Steering Wheel Software Rotation – Defaults to false, but must be set to true to enable this feature. When it is set to false, this feature should be fully disabled.

Steering Wheel Bump Stop Harshness – A configurable value ranging from 1.0 to 100.0, which acts like a spring constant that determines how much counter-torque will be applied if you steer beyond the maximum range.

Steering Wheel Maximum Rotation Default – The value of our maximum steering wheel range when there isn’t a wheel driver available that we can read this from or when “Steering Wheel Maximum Rotation from Driver” is set to false. Values from 40 to 1440 are supported.

Work in Progress

Our competition system is currently being integrated into the new UI. We want to make sure you end up with a seamless experience when joining any competition sessions. At the same time, we continue to extend the core system, making it more plugable and adapted to all kinds of competitions. Some of you might have participated or seen our latest community event, where we ran a simple competition. Expect us to do more of those as we finalize bits of the system and put it through some early access testing.

First off in our early access testing, we will be hosting a short Holiday special, planned between Christmas and New Years. Also, to kick off 2019, we will be hosting events regularly in Q1. Plenty of races and plenty of options to beat your friends – and perhaps even us at S397.

Last month we showed you some early shots of Nordschleife. The team is working all out to complete the track and all track side objects, which is a lot of work given the length of the track and all the different twists and turns. We’re confident that we can show you more updates in the new year!

For the past six months, we have been working extensively on a new material system. You may recall that we showed you some early previews of the McLaren 650S at SimRacing Expo and in a subsequent roadmap update, and we are very excited to tell you our artists are currently starting to work with the system and providing us with feedback on making it even more artist-friendly as part of an effort to start using these materials on our content. We’re not done yet, but at this point we believe we have a very solid foundation to work on as we’re fixing bugs and pushing this system. Just to whet your appetite, here’s a few more shots of the McLaren 650S.

You also deserve an update on the Tatuus license! We are still building these cars, and we can now confirm we will have no less than six different models:

Tatuus USF-17, which is used in the USF2000 championship and can be seen as the successor to our existing USF2000 car.

Tatuus F4-T014, which is driven in various F4 championships globally.

Tatuus MSV F3-016, also known as ‘British F3’, is driven primarily in the UK and at Spa-Francorchamps.

Toyota FT50, as used in the Toyota Racing Series.

Tatuus PM18, as used in the Pro Mazda Championship.

Tatuus F3 T318, used in the Asian F3 Championship as well as the upcoming W Series.

Winter is coming…

Looking forward to bringing you some very cool toys to play with this Christmas!

It´s getting colder outside, and most of us probably have either switched to winter tyres already or are planning to right now. Brace yourself, winter is here! But as simracers, we’re lucky, our season never ends, so let´s get into this month’s roadmap. It was once again a busy time for us. Let’s be honest here, that probably never ends either: we are pushing rFactor 2 further every single day, but it’s always great to head out to the community with good news like releases or announcements!

Botniaring

In 1989, the gates in Jurva opened to what now is known as the longest and most versatile racetrack in Finland, the Botniaring. It also features different layouts, thanks to the extension of the track in the past from a length of 2618 meter to 4014 meters, making it the longest racetrack in the country. Its smooth tarmac surface has invited multiple races to the region over the years, turning Botniaring into another Finnish motorsport center.

Mostly used for national championships, the track also became popular among northern European championships. With its 3 different layouts, the Botniaring offers thrilling racing action for all kinds of motorsport classes. It might not have seen a full European GT Championship yet, but you can change that in rFactor 2! Choose from the “Long”, “Long with Chicane”, and “Short” layouts to either be challenged by a high-speed track or to take on a breathtaking chicane that needs all your attention if you want to clock a fast lap time. Ah yes, we nearly forgot, the track is live now and servers are also running already, so what are you waiting for?!

Nürburgring

When we announced this track at SimRacing Expo, we already stated this is a monumental task. The 2018 scan data has now been fully processed, and in parallel we have been working on many of the track-side details. We don’t have a lot to show yet, as usually the phases of modeling a track involve a lot of work that is not immediately visible until quite late in the build. We did visit our artists and got some pictures from their workstations while they were working on the track. Planning-wise, we are on schedule, and in a couple of months we hope to be able to show you some in-game shots. Worth mentioning already is that this will be our first full track that is built using our new material system.

McLaren Shadow rFactor 2 Qualifier

After introducing three new free cars to the simulation, we headed into the harsh but exciting world of competitive racing, on the hunt for that one driver that would represent the rFactor 2 community in the McLaren Shadow final later on in Woking. But before anyone could claim this spot, three qualifier rounds broke down the list of participants to the last 30 that had a chance at winning this.

Round 1 at Silverstone

Round one saw our racers flying through Hangars straight at the iconic Silverstone Circuit in the McLaren MP4/8. With everyone ready to shine and willing to do everything to put their stamp on the first round of the new competition, our livestream saw plenty of action and great fights with everyone trying to get inside the top 10 to make their way to the Qualifier final. After 30 minutes we had our first podium of the rFactor 2 McLaren Shadow Competition with Jan von der Heyde winning in front of Michelle D Alessandro and Eros Masciulli.

Round 2 at Zandvoort

The first 10 had their ticket to the Qualifier final, another 20 tickets were still up for grabs. After everyone parked their McLaren MP4/8 in the garage again we went even further back in time with the McLaren M23, a pure drivers car. No electronics, just a steering wheel and pedals. And with these weapons, our best drivers out of the Hotlap Sessions had to go up against each other on Zandvoort. Long fast corners, a lot of banking, and the endless will to fight made up another great livestream during this competition, eventually seeing Georgo Baldi reaching for the top spot and sending Peyo Peev and Kuba Brzenzinski down to the other spots on the podium.

Round 3 at Indianapolis

The championship car of Mika Häkkinen, the McLaren MP4/13, was the car of choice for the last qualifier round, leading our drivers to Indianapolis for a last chance to earn their spot in the Qualifier final. With an aggressive rear end, this car meant serious business for our participants and Indianapolis GP wasn´t willing to make it any easier for them. As this was the last qualifier round, everything heated up quite quickly, with several fighting groups that had to be covered by our live broadcast. In the end it was too much pressure for some drivers which totally threw around the top 10 in the last laps of the qualifier. Managing to keep his MP4/13 under control, it was Mark Berends securing the first place with Kevin Ryan and Antonio Kolarec following closely.

Finals at Longford, NOLA and Sebring

All qualifier rounds had been done and it was time for the Top 30 drivers from around the world to face off in the Qualifier final. Due to it being the big finale with just one spot leading to the McLaren Shadow Event in Woking, we decided to send out drivers to 3 different tracks, using all the new McLaren cars to find out who will represent our beloved Sim.

Normally you would expect a write up about what happened, right? Yeah, me too… not gonna happen XD! There was just too much action everywhere and the battles really showed that everyone was willing to give his best to get the Ticket to the UK. So better watch it yourself! (You fancy a link? It’s down there!). To cut a long story short, after 3 intense races it was Nuno Pinto who leading the standings and lifting himself up to the next level of the competition, the on-site final. Nuno Pinto:

It was really good, I wasn’t really expecting to win the competition. The first race was almost perfect, pole position and win. The second race started really bad with the crash on turn 1, recovered from P20 to P9 and got some good points. The last race was so good, started from pole, but when I switched to 2nd gear the rear end stepped out and to avoid hitting the wall I had to lift the throttle and lost 5 spots, recovered to P3 and that gave me overall win. Really happy and I am already working to be in the best shape possible for the final in January, I don’t really know what to expect but I will try and do my best and make all rFactor 2 players as proud as possible!

On behalf of everybody at Studio 397 and McLaren we would like to congratulate Nuno and wish him all the best in the finals!

Developer Tooling

Developer (modder) tooling is an area we have been quiet on for the last couple of years. Internally, and when supporting our community, we have been building on the rather old 3D Studio Max 2012. Although we released updates that allowed you to work with the 64-bit version of that tool, the fact is that we needed to upgrade to the latest tooling. We are now doing just that, and we expect to release updated plugins for the latest versions of 3D Studio Max soon (they are currently going through internal beta testing). We are also making sure that these tools will continue to work with our new material system, and as always we encourage people to tell us what else they need!

Community Night #3

Our month was once again very busy, but we like to drop some hints here and there. So believe us when we say that we are working on way more than what we can list in this roadmap. Yet with all those sleepless nights coding, writing contracts and grabbing licenses left and right, there still needs to be some time left for us to also enjoy our favorite sim! Right?….RIGHT! Finally that time has come again, and you know its name from previous adventures: the Community Night is back for its 3rd event! Let’s dive into some racing action together on Sunday (4th of November) 7pm CET, to be broadcast on https://www.twitch.tv/rfactorlive

We wanted to celebrate the release of Botniaring and we thought it would be fun to put on our winter jackets and lap the Finnish track with you guys. Deciding on a car class gets harder with every new piece of content we add, so why not just race 2 different layouts with different classes? We will hit the short version with the USF2000, while the roaring GT3’s will conquer the longest ribbon. You can now go for your first laps on our Botniaring servers that are live with the launch, so get ready!

That’s all folks, and don’t forget we are still in the middle of the Halloween Sale, so check out our special offers!!!

To say September was a busy month for us would probably be the understatement of the year. Last time we already hinted at some big news, and the release of no less than three free, iconic McLaren race cars has certainly been well received and confirms our commitment to adding high-quality free and paid content to the simulation. We’ve met many of you at SimRacing Expo at the Nurburgring mid September. The event was highly successful, and I am confident that we will be back next year.

Directly after the Expo, we started our qualification rounds for the McLaren Shadow competition, which will continue well into next month. In the mean time we, almost silently, also released a big update for Zandvoort, featuring all possible layouts, a significant performance improvement as well as proper support for night and wet racing.

Material and Lighting System

Our final announcement at the expo was a new material and lighting system, which is currently in progress, and is based on physically based rendering (PBR). We’ve been working on it for the last couple of months, and its release is still a few months away, but the results so far have been very good. We showed some examples of our new car paint material that simulates a multi-layer paint job, featuring a body or primer, a base coat that is possibly metallic or two-tone, and finally a clear coat – each with parameters that allow you to specify in great detail the specifics of each layer. We did not stop there though, as our cars in general come with templates that allow users to create their own liveries. We now support up to six different materials that can be used on different, configurable regions of the car. This allows people to create liveries with vinyl wraps, shiny metallic bits, carbon parts and many other things all on the same car body. We are already looking forward to the unique designs our community can create with all these new possibilities. What we’re working on in the months ahead is other materials. Arguably the car bodies are very important, but we would also like to improve our cockpit interiors, the way rubber tyres look, and also our road surfaces. Obviously we will make sure that what we do stays compatible with all current content, but what’s more important, we aim to make it very easy to upgrade to these new materials. We’re committed to updating all our own content, and we expect the community to do the same.

Nürburgring

As we told you in the announcement, the scan is done, and both the Nordschleife and GP track are up to 2018 standards. We’re finalizing the important processing of the data now, which – as you might imagine for such a large track – takes some time. In the meantime, our track team already started the huge task of modelling all the details that are visible when you drive around the track: trees, houses, audiences, camping grounds and many other things. We are aiming for a release at the end of Q1 of 2019. In the meantime, we are also looking at our options for the Südschleife. Quite a few people have responded and pointed out available information about this classic track. We have not yet made the decision to build it, and if it happens this layout will certainly be done as a separate project. We’ll keep you posted.

Botniaring

We’ve included some screenshots of a new-final version of Botniaring. As the track was officially licensed, we got extensive opportunities to survey the asphalt and its surroundings, which allowed us to accurately reproduce every little detail of the track. Like many of our other tracks, we will provide the different layouts and we are sure this relatively unknown track will offer some good racing. The release is planned for October, and as mentioned before, this will be a free track.

UI and Competition

The UI and Competition are two areas with a constant buzz of diverse development activity. We’re now at that point where the two teams merge and start to work on getting the competition functionality into the UI itself. So in short, we’re currently integrating UI and competition and preparing for a launch of both systems ‘together’. You’ve probably seen and even participated in the multiple competitions we’ve put on over the last year, where joining and viewing stats was through our web page. We still want to offer join via our webpage, but our ultimate goal is for you to find and join a competition straight from the UI, making it that much easier and that much more tempting to take part!

Of course, we do have some new UI functionality to share with you as well. First, we now have that spiffy animated trackmap you always wished for This trackmap highlights the leader as well as the current driver you have selected (in white). You can click on any number on the track map itself and the list auto-scrolls to and expands that driver. Next, we have a brand new expanded standings pop-up function with color-coded best sectors. Finally, we’ve added a simple minimal graph to the standings, this gives a quick overview of your progress lap by lap as compared to the other drivers around you.

We’re hiring!

Some of you might have seen this post on our forum. We’re hiring! Specifically, we are looking to strengthen our track building team at Studio 397. We’re expecting you to bring your experience and knowledge of modeling tools, and of course you should be an expert in building good and accurate tracks. We will provide you with the necessary hardware and software, a good working environment and an education in tools you are not yet familiar with. If you’re up for a new challenge, check out the post and get in touch: https://forum.studio-397.com/index.php?threads/were-hiring-looking-for-environment-artists.61194/

That’s all for now, enjoy the remaining rounds of the McLaren Shadow competition and remember to keep it on the black stuff!

Sometimes you look at the calendar and realize that time can fly past faster than our LMP2 cars ingame. It’s already end of August and we have been so busy with working on rFactor 2 that there is no Roadmap yet. But we couldn’t do without one, right? That would be like breaking a family tradition, and since our team is more about fixin’ things than breaking them, let’s put together a Roadmap for August! As said above already, we’re pretty busy, but with what you might ask? As most of you probably know, SimRacing Expo at the iconic Nürburgring track in Germany is just around the corner and it will kick off big things for us. But let’s do this step by step, it’s a roadmap in the end! (wink)

SimRacing Expo 2018

There is enough going on at this years Expo that we could probably fill the whole Roadmap with it, so let’s concentrate on the major things you should know about it. Obviously we will have a booth at the Expo, so you can come around and meet the team, as we will bring plenty of people along. But just talking to us might be a bit boring all day long, so we will make sure that you will have plenty of reasons to visit the rFactor 2 booth. One of them will be new content that we will show exclusively at our booth, a pre-release of course. Hypemode intensifies!

You want to know more about what this could be? For now you need to live with just 3 words: iconic, fast, competition proven, more at the Expo! (wink) You think that’s it already? Enough reasons to visit us? Nah, we’re in for way more this year! The content shown at the booth will be our first announcement during the Expo, but as Germans say “Alle guten Dinge sind drei”, literally meaning “all good things come in threes”, meaning we will follow up with another announcement during Saturday afternoon.

This second announcement will probably tick a lot of boxes for simracers in terms of their dreams-list for our simulation. We are more then excited to finally share that with you. Sunday will see a third announcement (yep, you’re not getting a day to get back your breath) which will show our dedication to further improving your simracing experience. What happens if you can’t be around then? Don’t worry, we will stream all announcements and first talks about them live from our booth onto our channels. Missing them is not an option at all.

Before we all now dive into the guessing-game about what could be in the announcements, let’s have a look at the other topics of our roadmap…

UI and Competition

We are fully aware that everyone is awaiting news on the UI and we’re still working hard every day on this topic. Many steps are needed to implement an UI like the one we envision, which is taking a lot of time. We are still tweaking and optimising, and we will be able to show parts of the new interface at the Expo. Of course we are very curious to get your feedback there!

On the competition side, we have been integrating different session types so we can have events that consist of combinations of practice, qualification and race sessions and we are looking at different ways to score events. In the last month or so we have also been researching and testing a rating system, feeding it data of many races and evaluating its outcome. We’re nowhere near done, but some of these improvements we will certainly already bring to the McLaren Shadow competition next month.

Content

On the content side, we won’t yet spoil the surprises we have in store for the Expo. Previously we’ve announced both Zandvoort and the Reiza Pack to be almost ready and we do anticipate both to become available in September.

Community

Community is our favorite topic, because most of the time this means we can have some action as well. What we’re talking about? Obviously our community night! We did not forget about it at all, so you can expect a new date for some racing and talking on-stream soon. Maybe we should also do a vote for track/car combinations? As always, if you got feedback, suggestions/ideas, feel free to drop into our Discord server and let us know!

This month, we wanted to surprise you all by releasing the roadmap update a bit earlier than usual because we have quite a few things to announce, so let’s get started!

Upcoming Events

First of all, we have a few events planned that we want to announce.

ChinaJoy

August 3rd to 6th, Studio 397 will be present in Shanghai for the yearly ChinaJoy event. If you’re in the area, please drop by and take advantage of the opportunity to say hello and take rFactor 2 for a spin.

SimRacing Expo

September 14th to 16th we’re happy to announce that we will be present at this year’s SimRacing Expo at the Nürburgring. We invite everybody to come and visit us for a glimpse into the future of rFactor 2. As always we will bring a few surprises!

McLaren Shadow

Earlier this month, McLaren introduced their all new hunt for the brightest and best esports talent, dubbed “McLaren Shadow Project“. This is the follow up to last year’s “World’s Fastest Gamer” that saw Rudy van Buren take the win. We are delighted to announce that we will be part of this competition again, building several new McLaren cars for the upcoming events. And the best news is that they will all be available for free!

Upcoming Releases

Then, there are a lot of new releases coming up now and in the near future.

Today: New Build, GT3 and Endurance Pack Updates

We are about to release a new build with a few improvements and new features. Especially, but not exclusively, for our Virtual Reality users, we have included a new feature called “Stabilize Horizon” that allows you to enable a low, medium or high amount of stabilization, which helps keep the horizon stable on bumpy tracks and still works properly on strongly banked tracks. We’ve also made a few changes in our DX11 graphics engine. First of all, we caught and fixed some issues with the brake disc glow on some cars. An issue that only showed up on 6-core CPUs with no hyperthreading and caused rendering problems in our shadow maps was also found and fixed. For tracks, we added support for a new dirt map, a feature you will see on Sebring and that will be explained shortly in our developer documentation. We slightly adjusted the logic for our “pit director” that will tell you how and when to leave your garage as he was a bit oddly placed in some cases. Last but not least, we also spent some time optimizing our post effects, which has resulted in a healthy increase in performance with those enabled.

In our previous roadmap, we already announced that we were close to releasing an update to our very popular GT3 cars. Over the last couple of months, we’ve received a lot of feedback on these cars, and we sat down and incorporated all of that in this update. On top of that, we’ve included the new in-car traction control and anti-lock brake settings, position lights colored green for the GT3 class and our very latest set of tyres to align the cars with our endurance pack. We also tweaked the Balance of Performance to ensure continued close racing.

As part of our continued development of the Endurance pack, our visit to Duqueine Engineering, which we will report on in a separate blog, also got us some crucial feedback on the handling characteristics of the Oreca and Norma cars and a unique chance to compare telemetry. These and other tweaks based on feedback have been incorporated in an update of the Endurance pack.

Both packs will be released later today. Leagues that don’t want to immediately make the switch are encouraged to keep a copy of the previous version. That said, we’ve tried our best to ensure a good balance of performance and also made sure you can run classes from both packs together nicely.

Tomorrow: Sebring

Since taking over the development of rFactor 2, our goals have been clear: take an already incredible sim as a base and move the bar higher, push new and exciting features that you want, and give you the chance to experience a professional grade simulator – at home! The release of Sebring tomorrow is another step in that direction. We will follow up with more details later.

Next Month: Reiza rF2 Bundle

Some of you might have seen the teasers that were posted by Reiza Studios. We can now officially announce that they have been working hard on bringing some great content into rFactor 2. No less than four cars and two tracks will be part of this pack, all of which will be released in August. We expect Reiza to soon release more details of their planned content!

Community Night

Earlier this month, we scheduled the first community event, and we would like to thank everybody who watched and participated in it. Because of its success, we decided to do another one on Friday, July 27th at 20:00 CEST. We will obviously take this opportunity to look at the updated GT3 and Endurance packs. We will also take an in-depth look at Sebring International Raceway and provide some background on the process of creating it, so make sure you tune in and follow our Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/rfactorlive. We certainly hope to see you there. In any case, happy simracing, that’s all for this month!

June has been an eventful month. We released the Endurance Pack and we’re still in the middle of the Steam Summer Sale, which discounts the simulation and the different content packs and offers a nice opportunity to complete your collection. Of course we are already looking ahead again and while some of us are taking a well deserved break, others are working on all different areas of the game.

Studio 397 was also invited to the official opening of the virtual Maastricht city racing track. It is not often that one of our community created tracks attracts the local press and the mayor of Maastricht all gathered in a local movie theatre. Even Bono Huis, winner of the Vegas eRace, was there to do a lap. By now the track can be found in our workshop and can freely be downloaded.

Content

We are currently preparing an update to our GT3 pack as we already indicated when releasing the Endurance pack. This update includes the position lights, new in-car traction control and anti-lock brake settings as well as the latest set of tyres. All of those are in, we’re now checking the BOP and doing a few minor fixes.

For Zandvoort we’ve just finished the night lighting. There are still a few other layouts to complete and obviously we’ve also addressed some of the performance issues that were still present in the latest public release.

Sebring is in the middle of testing and optimization. As you might have seen from previous screenshots, we are trying to recreate the atmosphere on the track during the yearly 12 hour race. We are also planning a version with more of a “track day” feel in case you want to do some training without everybody watching your every move.

Rain

When we released our performance update, we already indicated that we were aware that the specific combination of using VR and rain still was causing problems, frame rate wise, and that we would be addressing those in a future update. We are happy to announce that we have found a good solution that gives a significant improvement and we’ll be releasing that next month. This update also includes another visual fix which made the raindrops become too large in external TV cameras. Finally it has a few small fixes that caused the wipers to sometimes skip a frame and not always start in the correct starting position.

UI

We are currently working on a few more important details in the interface. For one we are adding a search function to all places where you select something from a potentially long list of things, such as cars and tracks. We are also improving opponent selection, allowing more fine-grained control over exactly what cars you race. The final bits we are tweaking now are the standings, including the position in class we also use with our position lights.

Community Nights

We all know, racing and especially simracing is not only about competition. It´s also about spending time with friends and teammates and tackle different challenges. We always try to be transparent and close to the community, so we thought it would be great to arrange a date every now and then! The idea for community nights was born. Race among friends and developers, ask some questions or even see a race broadcast and enjoy the thrill of a friendly competition. Who knows, we might also give you a peek at some upcoming content in some of those events. We’ve scheduled our first event on Monday, July 9th at 20:00 CEST. Stay tuned!

Looking Ahead

Earlier this month we visited the Duqueine Engineering headquarters for more simulator testing. Expect a new blog about that in a few weeks time, where we reveal a bit more about how we collaborate. And remember, if you want to have a chat with us, join our Discord server or join one of our servers, running official content.

Over the course of this month we have released a few hotfixes for our fresh 1110 build whilst our team has been working on many of the features we’ve been talking about in the last few roadmaps. We also went to Zandvoort during the Jumbo Racing Days to showcase some of our content to the huge crowds that came to see several racing series and of course appearances from Max Verstappen, Daniel Ricciardo and David Coulthard.

Needless to say, we have plenty to talk about this month, and the first announcement we have is a new hire that starts tomorrow. Now we don’t always announce people that we add to the team and, as a reference, our total team in Studio 397 is about 30 people, currently. With our focus on building the competition infrastructure and releasing that later this year, we welcome René Buttler to the team. He has been working at ESL on projects and esports tournaments with a strong focus on racing simulations, and we are very happy to have him at Studio 397!

Content

Last month we already announced that our next pack would consist of 5 cars. This will be our “Endurance Pack,” and we are ready to announce one of the two previously unannounced GTE cars that will be part of it. All cars are in the final stages of approval by the manufacturers, which is a process we don’t have full control over, but it does indicate we’re getting close to a release now. That said, it is time to announce the Porsche 911 RSR GTE! Ever since the start of Studio 397 we have had a great relationship with Porsche, so we’re very happy to finally be able to share the news. We’ve licensed the very latest spec of this car to race alongside the other GTE’s, and we are confident this car will be a joy to drive. And it certainly looks great!

Earlier this week, we also visited the offices and test track of Duqueine Engineering again and validated both the Oreca 07 and Norma M30 models in their simulator with their drivers and engineers. We are also including liveries of various teams racing these cars to ensure we end up with a great looking field of cars, as you can see from the shots below.

That’s of course not all the content we’re working on. There are a several more things under construction.

The March and Brabham cars are close to completion now. We’re adding the final rain and damage effects and doing the driver animations. Physics wise we’re very happy. Each car has it’s own distinctive character, yet they are very competitive. The McLaren is still in the middle of production, so it’s expected to come a bit later.

Those of you who visited us at Zandvoort have seen the progress we made on that track. It’s still not quite finished, but it’s looking better, and we addressed the performance issues that people reported, so we’re in good shape.

For Botniaring, all 3D work is done, and we’re currently working on texturing and optimization. That work and the AI lines will be finished this month. Then we are going to be giving the track its final shakedown before releasing it.

For Sebring we are currently in the middle of adding all the track side objects. As you might know, building a track can be roughly split in two phases. In the first phase we’re building the roads and everything “up to the barriers,” and in the second phase we do everything beyond the barriers and things like AI lines, night lighting and various other details. We’d like to share our current progress with you, bearing in mind that not everything you see here has been properly optimized yet, so “things might change”.

UI

UI testing and tweaking is still ongoing, and we’re starting to integrate the work on the competition infrastructure into the new UI whilst also making the back-end more robust. Another thing we have started working on is the integration of Motec data logging into the core of the simulation.

Competition

First of all, congratulations to Oli Ellis-Richardson for winning the KartSim hotlap competition! Oli has secured an entry to the SuperOne British eSport Championship and a copy of the KartSim Pro package. In the USF2000 challenge the winner of last years World Fastest Gamer showed that he was still one of the fastest simracers out there: with a 47.443, Rudy van Buren took pole position.

Results:

Rudy van Buren

Joonas Raivio

Jakub Charkot

Robin Pansar

Kevin van Dooren

All of them have won a free pick of any rFactor 2 DLC pack, on top of that Rudy also won €100.

Community

This month we released the much anticipated performance upgrades. Judging from the feedback we got, build 1110 has provided most, if not all people a significant improvement. On top of those improvements, we also added several new features, one of which was a refinement of our tyre model, which Michael explained extensively in his blog. In the last couple of weeks we’ve been monitoring our forums and other channels to resolve any remaining issues. As promised, we also intend to address some remaining issues with our rainy conditions. In VR the performance is still relatively low, and viewed from external TV cameras the raindrops, when zoomed in, look too big. Both issues are still on our list for a future update.

We also took part in the Luminis DevCon, a yearly conference that we organize in a big movie theater by developers for developers. Studio 397 was there, and we brought two rigs for people to try rFactor 2. One of them was a prototype of a new monocoque by Bernax that was setup to use VR, the other our office rig with triple screens. As a special guest we had Rudy van Buren, McLaren’s World’s Fastest Gamer, join us for the keynote and answering questions and giving advice all day, and Marcel gave a talk about the future of simracing.

Norma M30 LMP3

Two months ago we announced we had licensed the Norma M30 LMP3 car. Working closely with both Norma and one of the first team to race this car, Duqueine Engineering, we are now in the final stage of production for this car, testing the car on different virtual tracks and comparing its performance with the telemetry and other data we gathered. This car will be one of five in our next car pack, joining the Corvette C7.R and the Oreca 07 LMP2, with two more, yet unannounced GTE cars to come. In fact all five cars are actually in the final stage so pending final approval from the different manufacturers we are getting close to a release.

Actually, the whole LMP3 class is fairly new, being launched by ACO in 2015, when five constructors were selected to build the chassis with Nissan providing a 420hp engine to power all of them. Norma introduced their car, the M30, in February of 2017, and since the car has been used by a growing number of teams and winning quite a few races they entered in. At Studio 397 we met the guys from Duqueine Engineering in one of their first races with the car at Spa during the ELMS race, and this is where we started to examine the possibility of bringing this car to rFactor 2.

UI and Competition

On the topic of UI and Competition we are still working hard to finish both, and at this point we really don’t have much more to say other than that both are being tested internally. Some of the things that are currently being tested are the localisation of the interface, which we are basing on open standards to ensure that it will be easy for translators to provide a new version in their own language by leveraging existing tools. On the competition side we are now testing sequences of different types of sessions, ensuring our servers can transition from one to the other and have the results of one session (such as a qualification result) influence the next session (the grid for the start of a race).

Historics

Last week we already showed you the latest screenshots for the March 761, the first car to accompany the Brabham BT44B which has been in development for quite some time and also served as the main character in a whole series of blogs that explain all intricate details of the rFactor 2 physics engine. What we did not say is that we are not stopping there. After these two cars are released, we are going to add another, and we are very proud to announce that this will be the McLaren M23. This car is the one James Hunt drove in and won the championship with in 1976, beating Niki Lauda by just one point! We certainly hope that these cars will please the many fans of historic racing we have!

That concludes this month, and its roadmap. We have a lot of things in motion at the moment and we’re pushing hard to finish those things so we can share them with you as, believe it or not, we are as impatient as you to start driving! Have a great month!